How to Prioritise Systemising your Business Part 1

There are many different ways to prioritise the systemisation of your business, and today I’m going to touch on one of these. In a previous article, I have already mentioned listing all of the tasks that you, as the business owner do, that could be passed onto another team member, with just a little bit of thought, putting in place a system, and then training another person to do that particular task.

But how do you decide where to start, and which task to start with? You can use the chart below, as guidance to help you work out where to start.

Take your list of tasks and plot them on the chart in the appropriate place, estimating how long each task will take you to write a system for and to train another person, and how long in turn that will save you each week.

Some example tasks are…
a) Cleaning the office (because this is a task that you haven’t ever gotten around to passing on to a team member, but now is the time to realise that you should only do what you can do and you should get others to do those other tasks). So currently this might take 2 hours a week, and if you were to outsource it, the task of outsourcing to a cleaning company might take a couple of hours to find someone, and interview them, and so this task would probably sit in box 1, quite near the centre line.

b) Answering the telephone. The system for actually picking up the telephone is a fairly simple one, although there are some simple rules and a script that should be followed. The complex thing here is what to do with the call once you’ve established who is on the other end of the phone and what they want. You can write a checklist based on the most common phone calls you get, and then deal with the unusual ones as and when they come in and add to the system. To brainstorm the sort of calls you get and to write a system on how to deal with them could take maybe 2 or 3 days over a period of time (while making notes of all of the different types of call), but could also save a good chunk of time, maybe half a day a week? And so you might put this task in box 2.

c) Opening, date stamping, and scanning the post. While you might think, “well it only takes me 10 – 15 minutes a day to do this as we don’t have much post”, that’s potentially an hour a week you could save, on a system that might take half an hour to write. So maybe put that in box 3.

By doing this with all of your tasks you will be able to see those tasks that are in box 1, and it is these that you should work on first, as these take just a little time to put in place and will save lots of time over the coming weeks and months.

This will free up your time to work ‘ON’ the business, on the strategy and vision

There are 2 further methods of prioritising which systems to write that I want to share with you in the future. If you think this will be of use, then please subscribe to my blog.